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Journalism of Courage
Locals squirted water and chanted “tourists’ go home” in Spain’s Barcelona over the weekend as their protest against mass tourism intensified at a time the country sees high footfall.
On Saturday, around 3,000 people took to the streets in Barcelona on Saturday, symbolically sealing off hotels and restaurant terraces, Euro News reported. Citing an impact on local life, housing and culture in one of Spain’s most visited tourist cities, Barcelona locals demanded a limit on tourist influx.
The protests, which began in the Canary Islands and Mallorca, prompting the Barcelona mayor to pledge elimination of short-term tourist lets within five years, according to BBC. The city council also voted in favour of raising the tourist tax up to €4 per person from October, apart from revoking roughly 10,000 tourist flat licences over the next five years.
The measure points to the council’s priority to prioritise residential over tourist use amid a ballooning housing crisis and high cost of living. Over the past decade, rent in Barcelona rose 68 per cent and the cost of buying a house rose 38 per cent. “We are confronting what we believe is Barcelona’s largest problem,” the mayor was quoted as saying by The Independent.
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